


Tithes of Blood

by May



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood, Gen, Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-07
Updated: 2014-02-07
Packaged: 2018-01-11 13:24:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1173577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You meet the Messiah when he’s very old before you meet him when he’s young. You get picked up in his giant claws and he cracks you open like a nut.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tithes of Blood

You feel spiked and rooted through your core, now. Before, you were grubflesh soft all of the way through and you let things just sit on the edge of where you could see. Sometimes they came forward, came right up close, but nobody knew about that. You learned later that it wouldn’t have mattered, anyway, although that knowledge arrived with a whole lot of other things too.

You realised before, as well, that your faith had once spread out before you and all around you. It had been the paint on the walls and the grain on the beach and the stars in the sky. And when it disappeared, so did everything else – the walls were dark, the ground was stone and the sky was the nothing of the void. You filled it, then, with the legacy of your own blood – after all, wasn’t that what everyone always said you should do?

But all the severed heads in paradox space wouldn’t have closed that up if no one had come to you to give it all back to you again. Once, you would have licked rancid grubsauce straight off of somebody’s fingers if they’d just given you a little attention. On a lonely rock, with the floor cold under your knees, the knowledge of that sits like oil in your gut, black and sour up to your throat. You learn how to snarl, even when you end up running your tongue up palms, anyway.

Some of those palms, though, belong to motherfuckers who you would never snarl at. The puppet becomes your friend and you feel hot and whole when he speaks to you. You meet your brother in blood and he’s calm and cold and full of himself. You don’t mind snarling at him and when your scratches are still stinging across your face, you say obscene things. Your words, without their usual fluff and now loaded with spite, are satisfying, in your throat, on your tongue, in your ears. He’s so much taller than you when you first meet, and all he does is smile, stitched up, and rest his long fingered hand between your horns. His light, cool press pulls gently at your scalp.

He itches around your pan, but there’s something bright behind you. It sings and you don’t have to worry, anymore. When you had no idea what to do, all those words just feed into cruelty.

You meet the Messiah when he’s very old before you meet him when he’s young. He’s huge and clawed, and he stares down at you and he looks through you, because he is the dude of time. You get picked up in his giant claws and he cracks you open like a nut. Your spine severs and your ribcage jags outwards, showing him the wet, fleshy nest of your internal organs. It hurts enough that it almost edges into numbness, but you won’t see the end of it until your body knits itself together again. If you were someone else, you might have considered that you should have made a line of different decisions. Since you are you, though, this is the only place where you need to be.

Your shoulders bend back in agony and he tears at your insides until you’re a husk. His palm cradles you, though, and he mutters through your flesh. After you’ve healed, you go on. You walk away and you don’t mind coming back.

He pulls you in half, from the bottom to the top. You are made up of spaces for him to claw open, where he can make a plaything out of your skin. Your flesh tears up from your nook, but he never decides to force himself inside you. Not that way. Later, it turns out he has to take a whole new form to do anything like that. When you become witness to that, it is the most miraculous thing you will ever see and, also, it makes you the troll of trolls, just for that moment. You also figure that there isn’t any point in him doing that for you. Nothing that can’t be quick and casual.

He leaves you to tumble out your insides alone, and then without much ceremony, you meet the Empress. Even _you_ must have had a notion of something happening that wasn’t her staring at where you gaped, where she could see all of you. She’s so old and so tall and has thick hips that sway when she walks. She doesn’t bother looking ashamed when she ogles your guts and it seems to you like she should, but it also seems to you that there’s no reason that she would.

In that moment, you find yourself snarling, but she just continues to stare at the pathetic jelly hanging out of you. She sneers, curling her lip to show her teeth. You pause, exposed, and she watches your flesh sew itself back together, again. She laughs and asks you why you let him do that. You don’t say anything because not so long ago, the bottom fell out of your faith. Your body is smooth again, and only silver lines mark where he’s been. She tells you she knew better clowns than you. You say that any motherfucker still stuck in the old world ain’t as good, as purely faithful, as you. Her mouth curls, wryly, and she slams her prongs down into the floor in front of your eyes and you imagine being stabbed away into some quiet corner of the bubbles. There would be nothing for you there, though.

Later, you’re the first living thing he sees. He watches you as he riddles you with bullets and stares beyond you at the trail you’ve left behind. He doesn’t stare through time, yet.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on tumblr


End file.
